


Inevitable

by A_Fantasist



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: ALSO i made up some daughters for them so don't get confused by the names, Angst, Death, Happily Ever After, M/M, Pynch Week 2018, Sad, day 4: death, its sappy as hell btw, mentions of robert parrish, not Opal story compliant? idk man, they die ok? They just die. Thats the prompt. Thats what happens. Im sorry ok? I dont like it either, you're gonna cry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 10:31:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15435090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Fantasist/pseuds/A_Fantasist
Summary: It had always seemed inevitable that Ronan would die young and violently. Car crash. Night horrors. Demon Unmaking. Beat to death by a tire iron.Pynch week 2018, day 4: death.





	1. Ronan

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so glad I finally have an excuse to post this bc it's just been sitting in my google docs making me sad for like a year and half.
> 
> That said, I wrote it before the Opal short story came out. I went through and edited some of it, but it still might not line up with canon completely. I also had them adopt two little girls, bc when I wrote it, it was purely a self-indulgent angst piece.

It had always seemed inevitable that Ronan would die young and violently. Car crash. Night horrors. Demon Unmaking. Beat to death with a tire iron.

No one had ever guessed heart attack at seventy three. 

That morning began like any other day. Adam was in the house, in the small room just off the kitchen that he had long since claimed as his office. Ronan was outside, doing his routine morning chores. He had been out in the fields, with the cows and his dream creatures. 

Then… he just dropped. 

Chainsaw, ancient though she was, managed to get Adam to him less than a minute later, and Adam rushed him to the hospital. The doctors took Ronan away, somewhere Adam wasn’t allowed to follow, so he made phone calls. Aurora, and Persephone first, of course. Then Declan, Matthew, Gansey and Blue.

They were all there, four hours later, when he died. 

Adam, holding Ronan’s worn and calloused hand between both of his own, their friends and family crowded around the bed.

He woke once, blue eyes shining as he pressed something into Adam’s palm.

“ _Vale, magus._ ” he whispered, “ _Vale, amor._ ”

_Goodbye, Magician. Goodbye, my love._

His eyes slipped closed one final time, and Adam let out a loud, broken sob. 

But of course, the death of a dreamer was never as simple as that. Declan frantically scrambled for his youngest brother as he slipped to the floor. Opal’s sister’s lowered her tiny, limp frame to the ground before her booted feet gave out from under her. They all knew better than to call for medical attention. They all knew this was coming. 

Blue held tightly onto Gansey’s arm and he put one hand on Matthew’s chest and said, with all the authority of a king and a god, “Matthew, wake up.”

Nothing happened. It had been worth a shot. 

Adam looked down at his hands, still holding Ronan’s. He turned them over, so Ronan’s palm was facing up, and slowly unfolded his hand. There were three spheres; gumballs. One was swirling yellows and blues, the colors of summer and cheer. The colors of Matthew. The second was dusty purples and muted browns, the colors of dreaming and earth. The colors of Opal.

Realization hit, and Adam hurried to force the marbled candies into the mouths of the respective dreamt up family members. It took a moment, but then Matthew was awake and breathing and crying for his brother. Opal was sitting up and being engulfed by her sisters. Gansey looked at Adam.  

“When…?” 

“Just now.” Adam nodded.

 

Ronan had dreamt up a life for his dream things, with the last few moments of his own. Had he pulled the life from himself to make these? Had he known this whole time what it would take to dream something like this? Had he always planned on using up his last dream to save lives, or was that just something he scrambled to do when he realized he was… that he was… dying? 

 

Just like it had been when they piled together at Monmouth all those years ago in the demon aftermath, there was now an unspoken agreement that they would all be staying at The Barns that night.

As they pulled up the driveway, it was like a punch to face, seeing just how much of Ronan had made up their home. The white stag was asleep under the apple tree. The flowers were limp and colorless, as was the garden. And Ronan’s dreamlights, which had illuminated the property in a soft, glowing light for all the many years… they were gone. 

_I’m going to have to get a nightlight_. Adam thought humorlessly. For so long, he had gotten used to those lights in his room, dimming and brightening with his husband’s subconscious. 

Adam didn’t stop to check on the dream stag. He stepped over the six legged cat on the doorstep. He made a beeline for living room, where Chainsaw was asleep on her perch.

He reached her, and pulled the third gumball from his pocket. It was smaller that the first two, and pure black. There was only one dream thing it could be meant for.

Adam carefully lifted Chainsaw’s head and pried her beak open far enough to feed her the miracle. 

Slowly, she blinked up at him. For a moment, Adam’s heart stuttered. If Ronan’s miracle made Matthew and Opal into normal humans… would Chainsaw still be… herself? After all these years, the dream bird was every bit as much family as Opal, as Blue.

But Chainsaw hopped onto Adam’s outstretched arm and croaked a sad “ _Kerah?_ ” 

Adam could hear his daughters crying in the hallway. 

No, Ronan did not die young or violently. He died an old man, weathered by time and loved by many. 

He died saving the lives of his loved ones… which had always seemed inevitable.


	2. Adam

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Adam had been a little boy, he had assumed his father would kill him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning: Robert Parrish and all that comes with him are mentioned in this chapter.

When Adam had been a little boy, he had assumed his father would kill him. He knew there was pistol next to his parent’s bed. He had taken a beer bottle to the head enough times to know that all it would take was the right angle for the broken glass to jam into his brain. He had seen his father drop enough cigarettes on the trailer carpet to know that it could go up in flames in a matter of seconds if not stomped out immediately. 

When Adam was a teenager, he thought he would work himself to death. 

Then he thought a magical quest would.  
Then he was certain it would be a demon.

 

But when Adam had survived all these thing, and lived to see wrinkles on his face, live to walk his daughters down the aisle, live to meet his grandchildren… after he had lived this long, he had rather forgotten the inevitability of his own death.

Then Ronan had died. 

Adam couldn’t express how glad he was that Ronan went first. He had watched that man mourn far too many people, and he didn’t want to be another person causing him that pain.

But now… Adam was lonesome. It had been eight years since the love of his life had dropped in field. 

 

Years ago, when he was in his early thirties, he had seen his parents deaths in the newspaper. Persephone had just been adopted, and was toddling around the kitchen when Adam dropped his coffee cup. Ronan, reflexes still just as quick as they had been back in his aglionby tennis days, scooped her up, and stepped over the puddle of coffee and shards of porcelain to lean over his husband’s shoulder. It took him only a moment to take in the jist of it. 

_**Two dead in local trailer park… neighbors heard shouting… not unusual, but then… six gunshots… shot her husband… suicide.** _

Ronan put Persephone on Adam’s lap and wrapped his limp arms around her, then wrapped his own arms fiercely across Adam’s chest, and pressed his sharp jaw to his hair. Adam knew what he wanted to say. _That bastard._ or _He had it coming._ or _She did something right for once._

Adam was thinking it too.   
It was the truth.

But Ronan knew that some truths were not meant to be said aloud. That some things, some nasty things, were meant to be thought in the dark parts of the mind and then left alone. Because once you said them, they would echo in the heads of those who heard. So Ronan stayed silent, and Adam stared blankly at the highschool production of _Oklahoma_ featured on the next page. 

The thing was… The paper was old. Adam didn’t read them regularly, and Ronan mostly had the subscription because Chainsaw liked shredding them, and because Opal claimed that the Classifieds had a better flavor than the rest of it. This one had somehow escaped being shredded or eaten… for three months. 

Adam parent’s had been put in the ground three months ago and he hadn’t even been called about the funeral details.

Now, Adam’s parents had been dead longer than Adam had lived with them. Those hellish years of his childhood were so long ago, and Adam had helped so many other kids get out of hellish childhoods as well. He was satisfied with his life. After so many years of so much ambition, he finally felt like he had accomplished everything he had ever set out to do. 

He was in Cabeswater, the new one, when it happened. 

It was the only Dream Thing, besides the ones Ronan had revived in death, that was still awake. It was tethered more to the ley line than it was to Ronan, but Adam still had his connection. He was sitting in the shade of a tree, his favorite tree, the one that he and Ronan had laid under so many afternoons, the one where he had proposed, the one where adoption had been brought up, the one where Aurora took her first steps. He was laying under that beloved old tree, when he felt his heart start to give out on him. _Thank god_ , he thought, closing his eyes, _thank god it’s here._

Aurora, who had been born on the ley line and had formed a connection with her father’s forest as well, knew immediately. Miles away, having lunch with her friends, she suddenly broke into hoarse screams of agony. Her wife could barely make out what was wrong, between the gasping and heartbreaking sobs, but she knew magical business when she saw it, and started making phone calls. Adam, who had been the phone answerer of the Parrish-Lynch family since before the Parrish- Lynch family had existed, was not answering his phone. 

Opal, who was a free creature that spend her time exploring the ley line, had been alerted by the forest. The usual latin/nonsense dream language turned into shrieks and wails. The trees mourning their magician. It ran up and down the line from that one tree like a wave, hitting Opal with gail force winds and salty raindrops. The forest crying.

“ _Adiuva me, Cabeswater!_ ” Opal screamed into the storm, in broken latin.“ _Adiuva me, placere! Egeo_ \- I… I need to be there. Take me to him, Cabeswater. _Auxilium_!”

It did. Though Opal had been a good fifty miles north of that tree, she began running, and immediately broke through the clearing, and was was next to the tree in seconds. 

In Henrietta, the ground shook. In the backyard of 300 Fox Way, a woman stumbled out of the younger of the two beech trees. She ran into the house, startling most of its inhabitants. All of the original Fox Way women were long gone, but the current ones knew well enough that if Blue Sargent was out of the tree of her own volition, that something was happening. She snatched the phone out of a young psychic's hand, hung up on whoever was getting their fortune told, and called Gansey.

Noah Sargent answered the phone and spoke to his mother, then rushed to wake his father. For a moment, Richard Campbell Gansey III relived every time Noah - the first Noah, Noah Czerny, Noah the Ghost, Noah the Friend - had woken him with dreadful news. Ronan’s bleeding out. Adam’s gone to sell his soul. The ravens are going to Glendower without you. Noah Sargent looked remarkably like Noah Czerny, with wing-nut ears and honest smile. 

But then he spoke.

“Dad.” Noah - Noah Sargent, Noah his son - said, “Mom’s awake. She called. She said… She said that… well, Uncle Adam…”

They buried him next to Ronan, next to Declan, next to Niall and the empty plot with Aurora’s name. Adam didn’t care where he was buried. If it was just him, he would’ve wanted to be left under that tree, and let Cabeswater do with him what it wanted. But cabeswater was too attached to him and didn’t have enough understanding of mortality to be trusted with his corps, But it wasn’t just him. And if it had been just him, that tree wouldn’t be special… Hell, that tree wouldn’t exist. It wasn’t just him. It was him and Ronan. It really always had been. Parrish-Lynch. 

It was him and Ronan, and Ronan had a plot in the catholic cemetary next to his father, and so there Adam would go too. 

Chainsaw, with her new un-dreamt Dream Thing life, attended the funeral. Sat on Opal’s shoulder while the remaining family members cried. When the service was finished however, Opal turned to leave, and Chainsaw hopped down onto the headstone. 

“ _Huc venisti_ , Chainsaw.” Opal sighed, holding out her arm. The Raven only blinked at her. “We’re all leaving. It’s over. They’re gone.” 

“ _KERAH!_ ” Chainsaw said, leaning down and snapping protectively at the & symbol between the two names. “ _Kerah!_ ” she said again, mournfully.

Opal dropped her arm, only to raise it again and scrub tears from her face. “Fine. Be that way, you stupid bird.” She said ferociously. 

Maybe it was the ferocity, so very much like her dreamer’s, that made Chainsaw fly to her, and say goodbye with a peck at her hair, but then she was back on the headstone. 

“Fine.” Opal repeated, softer, and then, “Take care of them.”

She did. And just as she had her whole life, Chainsaw became the source of rumor and lore. It used to just be the whispers in Aglionby halls " _Did you see Lynch today with that giant-ass bird, what the hell, right?_ " 

But for years… for decades… people would talk about the Raven that haunted the graveyard. Always perched on a specific stone, never with a flock, always ready to attack if you got too close. There was a rumor she was named after a power tool, but no one knew why or how that rumor started.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've got stuff written for Blue and Gansey too, but I probably wont get around to posting that for a while. But yes, Blue _is_ living in a tree.

**Author's Note:**

> Look. 
> 
> I TOLD you in the tags it was gonna be sad. 
> 
> Please don't yell at me bc you wanted to read some fluffy smut or something. 
> 
> Please DO yell at me if you cried bc bitch me too tf


End file.
